Choosing an Accessibility Checker

Can I use the Adobe Acrobat accessibility checker?

Using the native Adobe Acrobat accessibility checker to verify the “accessibility” of documents is one of the most common errors we come across with our clients. So, what’s wrong with using the Acrobat accessibility checker?

The quick explanation is that the Acrobat accessibility checker does not adhere to the WCAG 2.0 or PDF/UA standards (or any other accessibility standards for that matter). You might have noticed that the Acrobat accessibility checker specifically does not mention which (or any) standard which it is checking for conformance with It simply offers a “Full Check” without specifying what it is doing a full check of.

One example (of many) where Acrobat’s accessibility checker falls short is the List Numbering attribute. Acrobat will not ask for verification of this, but it is crucial for ordered lists.

Which accessibility checker should I use?

We recommend the PAC3 checker to our clients. The PAC3 tests 31 Checkpoints comprised of 136 Failure Conditions from the Matterhorn Protocol-the file format requirements specified in PDF/UA-1, which maps the WCAG 2.0 requirements to PDF documents.

Manual checking is still required.

Don’t forget there are some things that can only be checked manually. For example, computers can’t interpret content and so cannot decide if the reading order is correct or not. Color contrast and verifying the correct tag usage are another two examples where manual checking is required.

Conclusion

We understand that organizations like to use the Acrobat accessibility checker for convenience and because many end users may use it as their own way to check a document, it is important that you ensure you are fully compliant documents to your organizations end users.

When we remediate documents, we ensure that they will pass both the PAC3 and Acrobat accessibility checkers. We provide completed PAC3 checker reports with all documents we remediate.